CROWTHER JOURNAL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

The study re-examined the causes and effects of the Protestant Reformation in the contemporary church. The reformation in the church was championed by the fore-runner reformers-John Wycliffe and John Hus and the 16th century reformers-Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli and others. The aim of the study was to find out the root cause of the Protestant Reformation which was the rejection of the authority of Pope as well as many of the principles and practices of Catholicism of the time. The Catholic Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries faced institutional problems because of the corruption in the church and the failure of the papal authority to provide spiritual leadership. The immorality and the corruption of the clergy were the order of the day. The positive effect of the Protestant reformation to the present-day church is that it resulted in the creation of many different Protestant faiths and churches around the world while the negative effect is that it led to the disunity of the church. The researcher adopted qualitative method in the course of his research which relied on the written books and other literary genre. The researcher found out that reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity. The Reformation led to the change of certain basic tenets of Christian belief and resulted in the division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and Protestant traditions.

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